A lot of people are taught to read one word at a time. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing when learning, but a lot of people end up thinking that a word at a time is the only way to read. Maybe this is what’s slowing you down. To get out of this habit, what works for some people is to cut a hole in a piece of paper so you can only see a few lines of text at once. Then glance at the text and immediately look away. Don’t ‘read’ it just let the image of the text tumble into your head and let your brain try to make some sense of it. Then continue, glancing at a small chunk of text at a time. Eventually, hopefully, you can train your eyes to take in a chunk of text at once and let your brain process it for meaning.

Of course, sleeping well, eating well, and getting some exercise will all help with the speed you can comprehend things.

Note I’m definitely not an expert in this field, but then the people who claim to be experts often aren’t either, so I guess this advice is worth at least what you paid for it.

It boils down to what’s your definition of reading a lot. Some people can “scan” documents quickly, others are meticulous readers. I wonder how many of these “fast reader” reports control for these things.

I took a self directed speed reading course 25 years ago at my high school. It was reasonably effective. Essentially it boiled down to glancing at half of each line of text. First left, then right and then continuing down the page. Each lesson built on the next with reading comprehension tests after each lesson. My reading comprehension dropped off somewhat, but the word rate went through the roof. From roughly 1 minute per page to 10-15 seconds per page.

However, I don’t enjoy reading that way and seldom use it. It’s very mechanical and while I understand the material the continuous analysis about what I’m reading is suppressed. My comprehension drops a little, my critical analysis drops a lot and enjoyment is nill.

The key to speed reading like the key to most skills is motivated practice. You need to read a lot of books where your primary motivation is to find out what happens next, and to capture salient details without needing to or wanting to linger on pretty sentences. Genre fiction is great for this. Reading when you are younger, and more likely to be immersed in genre fiction also helps!

I read significantly more slowly than I did when I was younger. I used to read as you describe; to find out what happens next and subconsciously filter out “filler.” Law school broke me of that habit and now I have no choice but to pore over every word in whatever I’m reading.

You’re right. Health care is more important – in a world in which the U.S. faces no military peer competitors.

I don’t agree with Obamacare, but the libertarian position will only gain traction among non-libertarians on consequentalist grounds, such as those Friedman typically made, not by arguing that its worse injustice to be forced to help other people live longer and make less money than to keep all your money and allow other people to die sooner.

You are right that the Constitution charges the Federal government with defense, but that does not mean that the government does not have other duties as well. And with healthcare there is a moral imperative at least as significant as that behind defense.

What? The world’s fastest reader is not Tyler Cowen? This is truly shocking.

As for the Sicilian mafia, the link looks reasonable, but it should also be kept in mind that the romantic story about the origins of the Sicilian mafia (and its cousins in other parts of southern Italy) is that it arose as an organization to defend the peasants from impositions by the absolutist ruling Spanish during an earlier period.

I kept waiting for the article to discuss how the prisoners that are about to be executed feel about their body parts being sold. Shouldn’t at least some of the proceeds go to the family of the person who supplied the spare parts? But I forgot that the government says that these criminals are consistently patiotic and want to donate their bodies to the State free of charge. And at least they no longer charge the family for the bullet (since they use injections now, to avoid damaging valuable inventory).

I lived in Hong Kong in the 1990s, and everyone knew that the biggest selection and best prices for, say, livers and kidneys were before holidays, especially Chinese New Year. Executing a bunch of potential trouble makers before a holiday keeps them pretty quiet while everyone else celebrates. Plus it’s good family fun, but that was when they did the executions in stadiums for an audience. Now they use those mobile vans so that the parts can be delivered quickly.

Another theory of economics applied to explain the Italian Mafia. But why is there not a big Greek mafia across the sea next door, despite the similarity of cultures and climates? It may be the mafia is like certain forms of cancer: just brought about by bad luck and the initial reluctance of people to stamp it out. But Mancur Olsen’s “roving and stationary bandits” theory of government, and therefore the mafia as a form of government does have a ring of plausibility to it.

“This research attempts to explain the large differences in the early diffusion of the mafia across different areas of Sicily. We advance the hypothesis that, after the demise of Sicilian feudalism, the lack of publicly provided property-right protection from widespread banditry favored the development of a florid market for private protection and the emergence of a cartel of protection providers: the mafia. This would especially be the case in those areas (prevalently concentrated in the Western part of the island) characterized by the production and commercialization of sulphur and citrus fruits, Sicily’s most valuable export goods whose international demand was soaring at the time.”

#6self-reported health data,
…Some of those results are a bit odd. Although it’s possible to tell yourself a story about how the Massachusetts health reforms affected the body mass indexes of the newly insured, you have to stretch a bit.

Seems very weak, I think that it is too early to tell.

One would think that it would improve the health f certain poor people. It would be interesting if someone asked some poor people, would you rather the heart bypass or the $20,000 that it costs.